On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s effort to impose immigration enforcement requirements on over $1 billion dollars in grants that are meant to help victims of crime.

In July, the Office for Victims of Crime, the agency that administers the grants within U.S. Department of Justice, declared that states will be unable to access Victims of Crime Act funds unless they agree to help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s federal immigration enforcement activities.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.